Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family

by Sarah Beth Childers

Overview

Sarah Beth Childers grew up listening to stories. She heard them riding to school with her mother, playing Yahtzee in her Granny’s nicotine cloud, walking to the bowling alley with her grandfather, and eating casseroles at the family reunions she attended every year.

In a thoughtful, humorous voice born of Appalachian storytelling, Childers brings to life in these essays events that affected the entire region: large families that squeezed into tiny apartments during the Great Depression, a girl who stepped into a rowboat from a second-story window during Huntington’s 1937 flood, brothers who were whisked away to World War II and Vietnam, and a young man who returned home from the South Pacific and worked his life away as a railroad engineer.

Childers uses these family tales to make sense of her personal journey and find the joy and clarity that often emerge after the earth shakes terribly beneath us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821444689
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2013
Series:	Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	197
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Sarah Beth Childers is a lecturer in English at West Virginia University. She has also served as a visiting professor of creative nonfiction at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Contents

Family tree

O Glorious Love

Shorn

Through a Train Window

My Dead-Grandmother Essay

Cherished Visits to Her Home

My Grandmother’s Loving Bond with Her Daughter

Her Inspiring Romance with My Grandfather

Her Tragic Fall and Rescue

My Family’s Loving Eulogies

Something Useful I Learned from Her as a Child

Scissors

Christopher Michael

Joy

Christopher Michael(s)

Garbage-Bag Charity

At His Feet as Dead

Give ’Em Jesus

Hot Girls in Short Skirts

Shake Terribly the Earth

November Leaves

One

Two

Three

The Tricia Has Crashed

Kite String

Editorial Reviews

“Wonderfully rich and beautifully written … the collection is also self-aware and articulate about storytelling as an art and as a profoundly human means of creating meaning. Storytelling is furthermore a powerful folkway in Appalachian life, and one of the main themes of the book.… It is a deeply worthwhile and fascinating collection.“

—Meredith Sue Willis, author of Out of the Mountains

“Shake Terribly the Earth announces a new, clear voice in Appalachian nonfiction, free of cant, free of even the rumor of a stereotype. Sarah Beth Childers’s family saga engages the griefs of the region in many ways—times have been difficult in her native West Virginia—but a thread of joyfulness, like light, winds through these essays, as stories accumulated by generations at last find voice in Childers’s telling. It is a pleasure, rare and true, to sit with this book and listen.”

—Kevin Oderman, author of White Vespa and How Things Fit Together

“The West Virginia childhood that Sarah Beth Childers gives us in Shake Terribly the Earth is hardscrabble, pietistic, and loving. Disability checks, pizza, and Mountain Dew along with the Holy Spirit inflect this clear-eyed and moving portrait of a young woman’s coming of age in one deep corner of the American Landscape.”

—Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate

From the Publisher